Higher Education Webcasts

University of Venus

600 international ESL students. 3 levels of English. 3 academic tracks in 2 divisions: undergraduate and graduate. 4 or 5 classes per student. Classes cap at 20, 30, or 40. Classroom capacity ranges from 14 to 47. We have 27 classrooms and 65 (and counting) teachers. It sounds like one big multi-part GRE question with endless permutations. It is the reality of international education administration.

A good friend of mine claims that when he was an undergraduate, he always returned to school late, bearing a big box of chocolates or salt-water taffy, and charmed the Registrar's Office into waiving any late enrollment fees. Whether it was his deliberate charm or the sugar, he claims his tactics were successful.

Atlanta in August – hot, humid, and sticky.It had been seven years since I had attended the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting. I had been finishing up my PhD and planned to join the ranks of the tenure-track – the annual conference was mysterious and terrifying. Since then, my life has taken a very different path. I finished my PhD in 2004 and was pregnant within the month. The following year I was offered a high-powered academic dean position and turned my back on tenure-track.

“So what can you do with a degree in Cultural Studies?” I felt the deer-caught-in-headlights look come over my face as I realized that I couldn’t easily answer the question in the ten words or less the situation required.

Last winter semester, I didn’t teach. It was by choice, but it was a choice that dates back to 2001 when I first met the man who would eventually be my husband. I was just starting my PhD and he, after some time off school, had his sights firmly set on grad school and a PhD.

The first student looked at me with tears in his eyes, silent for a moment, and then said, “I have to call my parents.” The next tried to argue with me, then begged, pleaded, and finally resigned himself to the news. A third student meekly accepted my words, and the fourth didn’t come to the meeting at all, perhaps predicting that it would be about something she did not want to hear.

For academics of a certain age, having many fine balancing acts to prioritize is our prerogative. UVenus writers have blogged about the dilemmas of matching parenthood and work, working with both international and local students, and finding time for vacation and work. I am now facing yet another point of equilibrium: how do I make room for both research and teaching within the frame of my allotted working hours?

My office-mate Jessica spat those words out in exasperation one afternoon as she raced into the office with a pile of papers to grade and I raced out, laptop and lecture notes tucked under my arm. We were teaching, working at administrative jobs, finishing up our dissertations, and also working hard on our marriages/partnerships. At that time, neither of us had children but we both knew that we wanted to find time to add a kid or two to the mix and we also knew that something was going to have to give.

My career has always been important to me, but I never wanted it to dominate my personal life. Early on, I instated my “8 o’clock” rule: if it’s not done/read/written/graded by 8:00 pm, it would have to wait until the morning. This was the time when civilized people had a glass of wine and ate dinner with someone they loved.